Shang Jianyao thought carefully and gave the "best" suggestion:
"Just ask directly later."
"..." Jiang Baimian considered for a few seconds, "Let's forget it, what if it's a secret cult that can't be known by others? We should respect other people's privacy."
Shang Jianyao's thoughts had already run off in some unknown direction, and he said to himself:
"Is the ritual of that cult whipping themselves, dripping wax on themselves, pricking themselves with needles, and cutting themselves with knives?"
The more Jiang Baimian listened, the more she felt something was wrong:
"Why does it feel so weird..."
Could this be the legendary masochistic cult?
She "hmmmed" for a long time and came up with another explanation:
"Maybe Boss Wu Ge uses similar pain to suppress the state where only biological instincts remain?"
I wonder where he learned these methods from...
While the two were discussing, Wu Ge's door creaked open.
He had changed into a linen shirt, his slightly golden hair was very wet, and his face was slightly pale.
The vomit and various sundries on the cement floor of the room had also been cleaned up.
Shang Jianyao was about to speak when Jiang Baimian glared at him, so he forcibly changed the subject:
"Boss, have you ever seen a cat that looks like a ghost?"
Wu Ge slightly raised his eyelids and replied coldly:
"I haven't seen a ghost."
Jiang Baimian silently breathed a sigh of relief:
"It's a mutated creature that sneaked into the city. We took on a mission and are looking for it and its companions..."
She roughly described the appearance characteristics of the Sleepy Cat and the Nightmare Horse.
Wu Ge shook his head:
"If I encounter such obvious mutated creatures, I will try to hunt them down."
"Then have you seen a child? He likes to play games, wearing tomato scrambled eggs, oh, you don't know what tomato scrambled eggs are, it's a set of red and yellow things." Shang Jianyao asked.
Wu Ge looked at him and asked:
"Is this also a mutated creature?"
"No, this is my friend, he should have come to First City too." Shang Jianyao explained sincerely.
Wu Ge thought for a moment and said:
"Haven't seen him."
He answered a few more questions from Shang Jianyao and Jiang Baimian, without mentioning a single word about what happened in the room.
Jiang Baimian stopped while she was ahead and led Shang Jianyao out of the hotel.
She looked back at the surveillance camera at the door:
"Later, let Lao Ge flip through the surveillance footage from this period. It would be great if he filmed the Sleepy Cat, Nightmare Horse, or Xiao Chong. Yeah, he's the most efficient."
"Then what are we going to do?" Shang Jianyao asked.
Jiang Baimian pointed in one direction:
"Go to the house of the first patient of this 'Heartless Disease' epidemic.
"The first patient is always the most special, often revealing something."
The first patient of this "Heartless Disease" epidemic is called Aisha, and she lives on the 4th floor of apartment number 19 on Striped Street.
Her husband is a dock worker, she doesn't have a fixed job, and she takes on clothing accessories and certain parts to supplement the family income, and takes care of two children.
--In the Green Olive District, there are many similar part-time female workers, mainly concentrated in the garment industry, because the production lines of many factories are relatively old and have not been transformed. Many small accessories for clothing, such as flowers in different parts, special-shaped buttons, etc., need to be completed by workers with their hands.
This is not complicated, but the quantity is large. For factories, it is very uneconomical to hire a large group of people specifically for this purpose. On the one hand, there will be fixed salary expenses every month, and on the other hand, the next batch of clothing may not need this kind of processing, maybe four or five people with machines can complete it.
Therefore, the owners of small and medium-sized garment factories choose to find contractors, and the contractors will distribute the flowers, buttons and other accessories that need to be processed in a piece-rate manner, so that women like Aisha who do not have a fixed job can complete them at home.
The contractors only need to do two things: first, before distribution, find skilled workers to give Aisha and others a training to teach them how to do it, and second, pay a part of the fee to the corresponding gang, both to prevent sabotage and to use their power to deter those part-time female workers, so as not to sell the materials that have been distributed, and if they want money, they have nothing, and if they want their lives, they have one.
Striped Street is not far from Wu Ge's hotel, Jiang Baimian and Shang Jianyao only took five minutes to reach their destination and entered apartment number 19.
It's very humid here, the winter is bone-chillingly cold, and the summer is like a large steamer. Fortunately, it's not the hottest months yet, it just makes Jiang Baimian feel a little stuffy.
Along the banister with mottled paint, the two came to the 4th floor and knocked on the door of Aisha's house.
"Who is it?" Behind the dark red wooden door with many scratches and peeling paint, a childish little boy's voice came out.
His tone revealed undisguised vigilance.
Shang Jianyao replied in a serious manner:
"If I said I'm here to make friends with you, would you believe it?"
"No." The little boy behind the door replied without hesitation.
Jiang Baimian had already thought of an excuse, and said with a gentle and smiling voice:
"We are relic hunters, like the adventurers in stories, and we are investigating a strange cat. We want to ask if you have seen it."
"What kind of cat..." A more childish little girl's voice came out.
The little boy quickly interrupted her:
"Don't talk to strangers, Dad said there are bad people outside who will sell us! Only when he comes back can we open the door."
The little girl stopped making a sound.
Jiang Baimian took the opportunity to ask:
"Then where is your mother? Is she not at home?"
At this moment, she suddenly felt a little guilty, feeling that she was tearing at the children's wounds.
After a long silence, the two children behind the door were answered by the little boy:
"Dad said Mom is sick and has gone to a very far place, and she can only come back when she gets better."
Huff... Jiang Baimian breathed a sigh of relief, preparing to ask further questions.
At this time, Shang Jianyao asked in her place:
"Did you see how Mom got sick?"
The little boy's tone became very low:
"We saw it..."
"Did she get sick at home?" Shang Jianyao asked.
The little boy began to sob a little:
"No. That day, she went to Aunt Anna's house to get flowers to make, and she didn't come back by noon. Xiya and I kept waiting for her, waiting until our stomachs were hungry...
"Later, we heard noises in the street, so we went to the window and looked outside, and then we saw Mom. Her eyes were red, and she kept shouting, she was very sick..."
Jiang Baimian and Shang Jianyao already knew what happened next - Aisha hurt several people, and fled while evading the pursuit of the security officers, and was shot and killed near Rabe Street.
Shang Jianyao asked again:
"Were those flowers around her?"
"No." The little boy first gave an answer, then emphasized, "I can't talk to you anymore!"
Shang Jianyao took out a few "Larfi" candies and placed them at the bottom of the door:
"Thank you for your answers, this is your reward.
"This kind of candy will give you a bit of diarrhea, you can't eat too much, or you will get sick."
While he was talking, Jiang Baimian also squatted down and picked up three "Larfi" candies.
She shook her head at Shang Jianyao and said in a very suppressed voice:
"The children here can't resist candy, they will definitely eat too much."
She immediately smiled at the closed door:
"Only one candy per person, don't fight."
She put two "Larfi" candies in one by one, confirming that they were taken by the little boy and little girl respectively.
"I'll just lick it a few times, won't I get diarrhea?" the little girl asked naively.
"I'm not too sure either, or should we wait until your dad comes back and ask him?" Jiang Baimian maintained the tone of talking to children.
The little boy's "um um" sound was a bit loud.
Jiang Baimian and Shang Jianyao got up one after another and left Aisha's house.
"Judging from Aisha's son's answer, she should have already received the batch of handmade flowers she needed to make before she got sick..." Jiang Baimian analyzed as she walked down the stairs.
This is because Aisha's house is not far from the house of the subcontractor Anna, no more than fifteen minutes' walk away, even counting the time for training, she must have walked back before she got sick - the security officer's investigation results were also like this.
And judging from the fact that the batch of handmade flowers was not scattered around her, she probably suddenly contracted "Heartless Disease" on the way back.
The security officer in charge of this matter did not investigate this clearly, it seems because the batch of handmade flowers were all picked up by passers-by, so it was impossible to determine the specific location where Aisha's "Heartless Disease" occurred.
Speaking of this, Jiang Baimian suddenly turned her head and glanced at the door of Aisha's house.
She sighed and said:
"After the 'Heartless Disease' broke out and she turned into a beast, she still leaned this way all the way..."
Shang Jianyao did not respond.
Jiang Baimian quickly adjusted her state:
"We will simulate Aisha's route later to see which places she will pass on the way. Now let's visit the residents on the lower floors, these are the people Aisha may have met when she went out."
"It may also be people from above who happened to meet Aisha in the corridor." Shang Jianyao helped to improve the details, just like the usual group discussions.
This time, his thinking was not so jumpy.
"Yeah." Jiang Baimian took another breath, "Then let's visit them all."
In the next half an hour, they knocked on doors from house to house and saw all kinds of residents.
There were relic hunters who were injured from adventures in the Northern Shore Wasteland; a family where the husband was busy in the factory and the wife was working as a prostitute; a room that was empty at this time; a couple who had saved a sum of supplies and entered First City with great difficulty, but had not yet obtained citizenship and were living a very hard life; a middle-aged man who was full of illnesses and lost all his relatives because of drinking untreated water and eating Red River fish for a long time...
In the end, the two things that stuck in Jiang Baimian's mind were:
The narrow and dark staircase; no one over the age of fifty.
"Let's go." Jiang Baimian took the lead in leaving the apartment.
She and Shang Jianyao followed Aisha's possible route towards the home of the subcontractor Anna. Along the way, they asked the residents on both sides like genuine security officers, wanting to completely determine the location where Aisha fell ill.
After a patient investigation, the two roughly locked down an area.
Here, seven or eight-story apartments stand one after another, "squeezing" the street quite narrow.
Jiang Baimian looked up at both sides and casually asked Shang Jianyao:
"What are your thoughts?"
Shang Jianyao replied seriously:
"Wait for the power to go out."
ps: I got a little cotton-padded jacket, and successfully got promoted in seniority, hee hee. I stayed up all night, and I really can't do it anymore. I'll set a timer and then go to sleep. I still have to be busy with things this week to adapt to the changes in life roles. There may only be one update at noon every day, and then I will resume two updates, but the weekend single update will officially start. Thank you everyone~